Hey There!
Our next debate over covers is upon us. This time, I took to Twitter, but this time I went about it a bit differently. I asked for direct feedback on a cover I, quite frankly, hated.
And I received some great feedback from Chad Ryan, David Kemp, and Kyle Climans. I will go over each piece of feedback and then reveal the redesign. My hope is that this will be valuable to others who have a strong desire to practice designing their own covers.
My biggest concern? This book has the same problem as my first cover (the one I used for L’identité Politique as mentioned in my last newsletter: it has what I am now going to forever call the “Penguin Classics Cover Problem.”
These covers rely on horizontal guidelines for the eye (which is not necessarily a bad thing for anything written in English), rules of thirds, mostly Sans Serif fonts, and for each production run, you can easily identify the year range the book came out because the covers all look the same.
While I contemplate how I’m going to redo my first cover for the 2nd Edition of ‘L’identité Politique’
Chad Ryan’s Advice
Why we should listen to him:
Chad Ryan is half of Lost Boys Press. In case you haven’t seen ‘Ghost River’ – it is beautifully designed. All of their books are. Design is not a part of the process they skimp on. Ever. Given we have this value in common, I feel strongly about learning and developing my design process with his questions and advice. Thank you, Chad!
The Questions:
“Do the stars represent anything in particular? What about their shape? The way they are scattered?” [paraphrased]
The Advice
“…pull it way back. Look at a thumbnail view. Since people buy at that size, the image needs to convey something.”
I thought about this a lot and what we talked about is that the current cover looks like a scatterplot without conveying any useful information to a potential reader about the book.
Dave Kemp’s Advice
Why we should listen to him:
Dave Kemp is a friend of a friend. Part of the power of Twitter is being able to get advice from secondary connections. While his account is new and small, having a completely new and unheard of (to me) source of feedback means so much! Thank you, Dave!
The Advice:
“I feel like the stars should be different sizes. None larger than what you already have. And I wouldn't use five-pointed stars. Maybe try it with just circles?”
This addresses some of the same issue with the cover that Chad Ryan mentioned - the stars aren’t useful in the way that they are used on the cover. While stars are part of the recurring themes in the collection, it probably doesn’t make sense for all of the stars to be cartoonish, especially if in the thumbnail no one can see their points anyway.
Kyle Climans’s Advice
Why we should listen to him:
I’m not saying Kyle knows a ton about covert art for books, but I’d guess that he knows a thing or two about marketing. Kyle’s background is in screenwriting, which requires writing for and working with visual performance media. This background gives him a unique experiential advantage when giving feedback about anything interacting with an audience visually.
The Advice:
“My assumption is that the stars are meant to each represent one of your poems. Each one unique in its own way, while also part of a constellation/collection...”
This outsider perspective on the interpretation helps with the redesign by pinpointing where the miscommunication around the readers’ expectations and assumptions might be.
Next Step: The Redesign
The working cover redesign abandoned some of the horizontal lines and used one of my dark sky photographs and added in additional thematic elements from the collection. I also changed to a more organic font for the title.
For the thumbnail view, this no longer looks like a graph.
‘Celestial Navigation’ doesn’t have a set release date yet, but its production is coming along and I hope to have more information on its launch next week.
Stay Tuned! Thanks for reading and have a great weekend <3
Best,
Lo
Disclaimer (30/7/2021): This post has been edited (and may continue to be) from its original version to correct minor grammatical, copy/paste structural errors, and include additional hyperlinks. This post has not been edited to alter the *content* of the information present. Any alterations to the content will be dated and this disclaimer updated.